Communists and the National Question, Part 3: The Debate during the Revolutionary Wave and the Lessons for Today

In
these articles we have looked at the debates among communists on the
relationship between the proletarian revolution and the national question:

on
the eve of capitalism’s decadence over the issue of whether revolutionaries
should support ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ (see IR 34);

during the first imperialist world war within the Zimmerwald Left on the
implications of the new conditions of decadence for the old ‘minimum programme’
of social democracy and the class nature of national wars (see IR 37).

In
this third and last articles we want to examine the most crucial testing time
for the revolutionary movement: the historic events between the seizure of
power by the Russian workers in 1917 and the Second Congress of the Communist
International in 1920; from the first optimistic step towards the destruction
of capitalism to the first signs of defeat of the workers’ struggles and the
degeneration of the movement in Russia.

In
these years the errors of the Bolsheviks on the issue of self-determination
were put into practice and in the search for allies the young Communist
International embarked on an opportunist course towards support for national
liberation struggles in the colonies. If the CI was still a revolutionary force
in this period, it had already taken the first fatal steps towards its capitulation
to the bourgeoisie’s counter-revolution. This only underlines the necessity
today to make a critique of this proletarian experience in order to avoid a
repetition of its mistakes; a point many in the revolutionary milieu still fail
to understand (see article on the IBRP in IR 41).

THE
ERROR OF ‘SELF-DETERMINATION’ IN PRACTICE

The
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia in
1917 concretely posed the question: which class rules? In the face of the
threat of worldwide soviet power, the bourgeoisie, whatever its national
aspirations, was confronted with its own struggle for survival as a class. Even
in the most remote corners of the old Tsarist empire, the issue posed by
history was the confrontation between the classes – not ‘democratic rights’ or
the ‘completion of the bourgeois revolution’. Nationalist movements became the
pawns of the imperialist powers in their struggle to destroy the proletarian
threat:

In
the midst of this class war, the Bolsheviks were soon forced to accept that the
blanket recognition of self-determination could only lead to the
counter-revolution: as early as 1917 the Ukraine had
been granted independence only to ally with French imperialism and turn against
the proletariat. Within the Bolshevik Party there was a strong opposition to
this policy, as we have seen, led by Bukharin and Piatakov and including
Dzerzhinsky, Lunacharsky and others. In 1917 Piatakov had almost carried the
debate in the Party, putting forward the slogan “Away with all frontiers!” The
outcome, under Lenin’s influence, was a compromise: self-determination for the working
class of each country. This still left all the contradictions of the policy
intact.

The
group around Piatakov, which held a majority in the Party in the Ukraine,
opposed this compromise and called instead for the centralization of all
proletarian forces in the Communist International as a way to maintain class
unity against national fragmentation. This argument of the Left Bolsheviks was
ridiculed by Lenin at the time, but from the perspective of the later
degeneration of the Russian revolution, their emphasis on proletarian
internationalism appears doubly valid. When Lenin denounced their position as
‘Great Russian chauvinism’ he was betraying a national vision of the role of
revolutionaries, who take their starting point from the interests of the world
revolution.

It
was in the most developed capitalist parts of the Tsarist empire that the
disastrous results of the Bolsheviks’ policy were clearest and it was here that
Rosa Luxemburg concentrated her attack on self-determination in practice
(published after her murder). Both Poland and Finland
contained well-developed nationalist bourgeoisies who feared above all a
proletarian revolution. Both were granted independence, only to rely for their
existence on the backing of the imperialist powers. Under the slogan of
self-determination the bourgeoisies of these countries massacred workers and
communists, dissolved the soviets and allowed their territory to be used as a
springboard for the armies of imperialism and the white reaction.

Luxemburg
saw all this as a bitter confirmation of her own pre-war polemic against Lenin:

“The Bolsheviks are in part responsible
for the fact the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and a
breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened
the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in
the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of
peoples, or – something which was really implicit in this slogan – the
disintegration of Russia.... While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected
that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they
would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus,
etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed
the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly
granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian
revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection, to carry the
banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself.” (The
Russian Revolution)

Putting
self-determination into practice after 1917 exposed the contradiction between
the original intention of Lenin to help weaken imperialism and the resulting
constitution of bulwarks against the proletarian revolution, where the
bourgeoisie was able to channel working class struggles into national wars and
massacres. The balance sheet of this experience therefore is strictly negative.

THE
FIRST CONGRESS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

The
Third (Communist) International, in the invitation to its First Congress in
1919, proclaimed the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase, “...the epoch
of the disintegration and collapse of the entire capitalist world system.”

The
CI put forward a clear international perspective for the working class: the
entire capitalist system was no longer progressive and must be destroyed by the
mass action of the workers organised in workers’ councils or soviets. The world
revolution which had begun with the seizure of political power by the soviets
in Russia
showed concretely that the destruction of the capitalist state was on the
immediate agenda.

In
the first year of its work, the CI made no specific reference to support for
national liberation struggles, or to the ‘right of nations to
self-determination’. Instead, it clearly posed the need for international class
struggle. The CI was born at the height of the revolutionary wave which had
brought the imperialist war to a shuddering halt and forced the warring
bourgeoisies to unite in their efforts to destroy this proletarian threat. The
class struggle in the capitalist heartlands – in Germany, France, Italy,
Britain and America – gave an enormous impulse to the efforts of the
International to clarify the needs of the world revolution which then appeared
on the brink of victory, and for this reason the major texts of the First
Congress in many ways represent a zenith in the CI’s clarity.

The Manifesto
of the CI “to the proletariat of the entire world” gave a very broad,
historical perspective to the national question, beginning from the recognition
that “The national state, which imparted a mighty impulse to capitalist
development, has become too narrow for the further development of the
productive forces.” Within this perspective it dealt with two specific
questions:

- the
small, oppressed nations of Europe
which possessed only an illusory independence and before the war had relied on
the uninterrupted antagonisms between the imperialist powers. These nations had
their own imperialist presentations and now relied for guarantees on Allied
imperialism, which under the slogan of ‘national self-determination’ oppressed
and coerced them: “The small peoples can be assured the opportunity of a free
existence only by the proletarian revolution, which will liberate the
productive forces of all countries from the constraint of the national state...

- the
colonies which had also been drawn into the war to fight for imperialism. This
posed sharply their role as suppliers of cannon fodder to the major powers, and
had led to a series of open insurrections and revolutionary ferment in India, Madagascar,
Indo-China, etc. Again, the Manifesto emphasised that:

“The
emancipation of the colonies is possible only in conjunction with the
emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not
only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain
their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and
France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into
their own hands... Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The
hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will
also be the hour of your own liberation!"

The
message of the CI was clear. The liberation of the masses throughout the world
would only come through the victory of the proletarian revolution, whose key
was to be found in the capitalist heartlands of western Europe with the
struggles of the strongest and most experienced concentrations of workers. The
way forward for the masses in the underdeveloped countries lay in uniting “under
the banner of workers’ soviets, of revolutionary struggle for power and the
dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International...”

These
brief statements, based as they were on recognition of the decadence of
capitalism, still shine out today as beacons of clarity. But they hardly
represent a coherent strategy to be followed by the proletariat and its party
in a revolutionary period; it was still necessary to clarify the vital question
of the class nature of national liberation struggles, as well as to define the
attitude of the working class to the oppressed masses and non-exploiting strata
in the underdeveloped countries, who had to be won over to the side of the
proletariat in its struggle against the world bourgeoisie.

These
questions were taken up by the Second Congress of the CI in 1920. But if this
Congress, with its much greater participation and deeper debate, saw many
advances on the level of concretising the lessons of the Russian revolution and
the need for a centralised, disciplined organisation of revolutionaries, we
also saw here the first major signs of a regression from the clarity reached by
the First Congress – the beginnings of tendencies towards opportunism and
centrism within the young Communist International. Any attempt to draw up a
balance sheet of the work of the Second Congress must begin from these
weaknesses which were to prove fatal when the revolutionary wave subsided.

Opportunism
was able to take root in the conditions of isolation and exhaustion in the
Russian bastion. Even by the time of the First Congress the revolution in Germany had
suffered a serious blow with the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and over
20,000 workers, but Europe was
ablaze with revolutionary struggles which still threatened to topple the
bourgeoisie. By the time the delegates gathered for the Second Congress the
balance of forces had already begun to tip substantially in the bourgeoisie’s
favour and the Bolsheviks in Russia were
forced to think more in terms of a long drawn-out siege than a swift defeat of
world capitalism. So whereas the emphasis at the First Congress had been on the
imminence of the revolution in western Europe and the spontaneous energies of
the working class, the Second Congress stressed:

the
problem of organising the soviet movement throughout the world;

the
need to build up the defence of the bastion in Russia.

Weighed
down by the harsh necessities of famine and civil war, the Bolsheviks began to
compromise the original clarity of the Communist International in favour of
expedient alliances with dubious and even outright bourgeois elements among the
debris of the bankrupt Second International, in order to build ‘mass parties’
in Europe which would give maximum
aid to the bastion. The search for possible support among the national
liberation struggles in the underdeveloped countries must be seen in this same
light.

The
cover for this opportunist course was the war against the left-wing in the
International, announced by Lenin in his famous pamphlet ‘Left-Wing’
Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In fact, in his opening speech to the
Second Congress, Lenin still stressed that “Opportunism is our main enemy... In
comparison with this task the correction of the mistakes of the ‘left’ trend in
Communism will be an easy one.” (The Second Congress, vol.1, p.28).
However, in a situation of reflux in the class struggle, the effect of this
tactic could only open the door further to opportunism whilst weakening its
most intransigent opponents, the left-wing. As Pannekoek wrote afterwards to
the anarchist Muhsam:

“We regard the Congress as guilty of
showing itself to be, not intolerant, but much too tolerant. We do not reproach
the leaders of the Third International for excluding us; we censure them for
seeking to include as many opportunists as possible. In our criticism, we are
not concerned about ourselves, but about the tactics of communism; we do not
criticise the secondary fact that we ourselves were excluded from the community
of communists, but rather the primary fact that the Third International is
following in western Europe a tactic both false and disastrous for the proletariat.”
(Die Aktion, 19 March 1921)

This
was to prove equally correct in the case of the CI’s position on national
liberation struggles.

THE
SECOND CONGRESS: “OPPORTUNISM IS OUR MAIN ENEMY”

The
Theses on the National Colonial Question adopted at the Second Congress reveal
above all an uneasy attempt to reconcile a principled internationalist position
and denunciation of the bourgeoisie with direct support for what were termed
‘national-revolutionary’ movements in the backward countries and the colonies:

“As
the conscious express of the proletarian class struggle to throw off the yoke
of the bourgeoisie, and in accordance with its main task, which is the fight
against bourgeois democracy and the unmasking of its lies and hypocrisy, the
Communist Party should not place the main emphasis in the national question on
abstract and formal principles, but in the first place on an exact evaluation
of the historically given and above all economic milieu. Secondly it should
emphasise the explicit separation of the interests of the oppressed classes, of
the toilers, of the exploited, from the general concept of the national
interest, which means the interests of the ruling class. Thirdly it must
emphasise the equally clear division of the oppressed, dependent nations which
do not enjoy equal rights from the oppressing, privileged nations, as a counter
to the bourgeois democratic lie which covers over the colonial and financial
enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s total population, by a tiny
minority of the richest and most advanced capitalist countries, that is
characteristic of the epoch of finance capital and imperialism.” (Second Thesis)

This established the primary task of the Communist
Party as the struggle against bourgeois democracy, a point reiterated in many
other texts of the CI. This was crucial to a marxist approach. The second
emphasis was on the rejection of the 'national interest’ which belonged only to
the bourgeoisie. As the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed with profound
clarity over seventy years before, the workers have no fatherland to defend.
The most fundamental antagonism in capitalist society is the strugglebetween the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
which alone offers a revolutionary dynamic towards the destruction of
capitalism and the creation of communism, and any attempt to blur this
separation of historic interests consciously or unconsciously defends the
interests of the ruling class.

It is in this sense that we must understand the
third emphasis in the Second Thesis, which is much more vague, and remains a
simple description of the situation of world imperialism, in which the majority
of the underdeveloped countries was ruthlessly pillaged by a minority of the
more highly developed capitalist countries. Even in the ‘oppressed countries’
there was no ‘national interest’ for the proletariat to defend. The struggle
against patriotism was a basic principle of the workers’ movement which could
not be broken, and further on, the Theses emphasised the primordial importance
of the class struggle:

“From
the principles set forth it follows that the whole policy of the Communist
International must be based mainly on the union of the workers
and toiling masses of all nations and countries in the common revolutionary
struggle for the overthrow of the landlords and of the bourgeoisie.” (Fourth
Thesis, our emphasis)

There was, however, an ambiguity in this emphasis
on the division between oppressed and oppressor nations, an ambiguity which was
subsequently exploited to help to justify a policy of the proletariat giving
direct support to national liberation struggles in the underdeveloped countries
with the aim of ‘weakening’ imperialism. Thus, while it was necessary for the
Communist Parties “to clarify constantly that only the soviet order is capable
of assuring nations true equality by uniting first the proletariat and then the
whole mass of toilers in the fight against the bourgeoisie,” in the same breath
it was stated that it was necessary “to give direct support to the
revolutionary movements in dependent nations and those deprived of their
rights, through the Communist Parties of the countries in question.” (Ninth
Thesis)

There is a further ambiguity introduced here: What
is the exact class nature of this ‘revolutionary movement’? It is not a reference
to the political milieu of the embryonic proletariat in the backward countries.
The same uneasiness of terminology runs throughout the Theses, which sometimes
talk of ‘revolutionary liberation’ movements, sometimes ‘national liberation’
movements. In addition, the actual form that this direct support should take
was left to each individual Communist Party, where one existed.

There was at least a recognition in the Eleventh
Thesis of the potential dangers in such support, for it warned that: “A determined fight is necessary against
the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements
that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist
International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the
colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future
proletarian parties... and training them to be conscious of their special
tasks.... of fighting against the bourgeois democratic tendencies within their
own nation. The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary
movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way should
even make an alliance with it; it may not, however, fuse with it, but most
unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement,
be it only in embryo.”

The material issue here was whether national
liberation struggles in the colonies still had a progressive character. It was
not yet unequivocally clear that the epoch of bourgeois democratic revolutions
was definitely over in Africa, Asia and the Far East. Even those
communists in western Europe who during the war had opposed the slogan of
‘self-determination’ made an exception in the case of the colonies. It had not
yet been settled by the experience of the proletariat that even in the farthest
corners of the globe capitalist ascendancy had ended and that even the
bourgeoisie in the colonies could only survive by turning against its ‘own’
proletariat.

But the most serious failure of the Second Congress
was not to thrash out this question in open debate, especially when the thrust
of many contributions from communists in the underdeveloped countries pointed
towards a rejection of any support for the bourgeoisie, even in the colonies.

Within the Commission on the National and Colonial
Question there was a debate around the ‘Supplementary Theses’ put forward by
the Indian communist MN Roy who, while sharing many of the views of Lenin and
the majority of the CI, high lighted a growing contradiction between bourgeois
nationalist movements which pursued political independence while preserving
capitalist order and the interests of the poor peasantry. Roy saw the most important task of the Communist
International as the creation of: “communist
organisations of peasants and workers in order to lead them to the revolution
and the setting up of soviet power. In this way the masses of the people in the
backward countries will be brought to communism not by capitalist development
but by the development of class consciousness under the leadership of the
proletariat of the advanced countries.”(Supplementary Theses on the National and
Colonial Question).

This would involve a fight against the domination
of bourgeois nationalist movements.

In support of his Theses, Roy pointed to the rapid industrialisation of colonies
like India, Egypt, the Dutch East Indies
and China, with a consequent growth of the proletariat; in India there had been enormous strike waves with the
development of an independent movement among the exploited masses outside the
control of the nationalists.

The debate in the Commission was about whether it
was correct in principle for the Communist International to support bourgeois
nationalist movements in the backward countries. There was a tentative
understanding that the imperialist bourgeoisie was actively encouraging such
movements for its own reactionary purposes, as Lenin acknowledged in his
introductory speech to the Congress:

“A
certain understanding has emerged between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting
countries and that of the colonies, so that very often even perhaps in
most cases, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, although they
support national movements, nevertheless fight against all
revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes with a certain degree of
agreement with the imperialist bourgeoisie, that is to say together with
it.” (The Second Congress,
vol. 1, p. 111 our emphasis)

But the ‘solution’ to the divergence in the
Commission, agreed by Roy, was to adopt both sets of Theses, replacing the
words ‘bourgeois-democratic’ with ‘national-revolutionary’:

“The point about this is that as communists we will
only support the bourgeois freedom movements in the colonial
countries if these movements are really revolutionary and if their representatives
are not opposed to us training and organising the peasantry in a
revolutionary way. If that is no good, then the communists there also
have a duty to fight against the reformist bourgeoisie...” (Ibid,
our emphasis)

Given the great amount of uneasiness on the part of
the CI in giving any support to nationalist movements, this was a clear case of
fudging the issue; i.e. of centrism. The change in terminology had no substance
in reality and only obscured the historic alternative posed by the entry of capitalism
into its decadent epoch: either the international class struggle against the
national interest of the bourgeoisie, or the subordination of the class
struggle to the bourgeoisie and its counter-revolutionary nationalist
movements. The acceptance of the possibility of support for national liberation
struggles in the underdeveloped countries by centrist majority of the CI paved
the way for more overt forms of opportunism.

THE BAKU CONGRESS AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF OPPORTUNISM

This opportunist tendency hardened after the Second
Congress. Immediately afterwards a Congress of the Peoples of the East was held
at Baku, at which the leaders of the Communist International re-affirmed their
support for bourgeois nationalist movements and even took the step of issuing a
call for a ‘holy war’ against British imperialism.

The policies pursued by the world party of the
proletariat were more and more being dictated by the contingent needs of the
defence of the SovietRepublic rather than by the interests of the world revolution. The Second
Congress had established this as a major axis of the CI. The Baku Congress
followed this axis, addressing itself particularly to those national minorities
in countries adjacent to the besieged SovietRepublic where British imperialism was threatening to strengthen its influence
and thus create new springboards for armed intervention against the Russian
bastion.

The fine speeches at the Congress and the
declaration of solidarity between the European proletariat and the peasants of
the East, with many formally correct statements on the need for soviets and for
revolution, were not enough to hide the opportunist course towards the
indiscriminate backing of nationalist movements:

“We
appeal, comrades, to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of
the East when these peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe. We know, comrades, that our enemies
will say that we are appealing to the memory of the great conquering Caliphs of
Islam. But we are convinced that yesterday (i.e. in the Congress – ICC) you
drew your daggers and your revolvers not for aims of conquest, not to turn
Europe into a graveyard – you lifted them in order, together with the workers
of the whole world, to create a new civilisation, that of the free worker.” (Radek, quoted in Congress of the Peoples of
the East, New Park, 1977, pp. 51-52)

The Manifesto issued by the Congress
concluded with a summons to the peoples of the East to join “the first real
holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International”; more
specifically, a jihad against “the common enemy, imperialist Britain”.

Even at the time there was a reaction against these
blatant attempts to reconcile reactionary nationalism with proletarian
internationalism. Lenin himself warned against ‘painting nationalism red’.
Significantly, Roy criticised the Congress before it was held, and
refused to attend what he dubbed as “Zinoviev’s Circus”, while John Reed, the
American left-wing communist, also objected bitterly to its “demagogy and display”.

However, such responses failed to address the roots
of the opportunist course being followed, remaining instead on a centrist
terrain of conciliation with more open expression of opportunism, and hiding
behind the Theses of the Second Congress, which, to say the least covered a
multitude of sins in the revolutionary movement.

Already in 1920 this opportunist course involved
direct support to the bourgeois nationalist movement of Kemal Pasha in Turkey, even though at the time Kemal had given his support
to the religious power of the Sultan. This was hardly the policy of the
Communist International, as Zinoviev noted, but: “...at the same time we say that we are ready to help any revolutionary
struggle against the British government.”
(Congress, p.33). The very next year the leader of this ‘revolutionary
struggle’ had the leaders of the Turkish Communist Party executed. Despite
this, the Bolsheviks and the CI continued to see a ‘revolutionary potential’ in
this nationalist movement until Kemal’s alliance with the Entente in 1923,
choosing to ignore the massacre of workers and communists in favour of seeking
an ally in a strategically important country on Russia’s borders.

The CI’s policies in Persia and the Far East had
similarly disastrous results, proving that Kemal was no accident but simply an
expression of the new epoch of capitalist decadence, in which nationalism and
the proletarian revolution were utterly irreconcilable.

The results of all this opportunism were fatal for
the workers’ movement. With the world revolution sinking into deeper and deeper
defeat, and the proletariat in Russia exhausted and decimated by famine and civil war,
the Communist International more and more became the foreign policy instrument
of the Bolsheviks, who found themselves in the role of managers of Russian
capital. From being a serious error within the workers’ movement, the policy of
support for national liberation struggles was transformed by the late 1920s
into the imperialist strategy of a capitalist power. A decisive moment in this
involution was the CI’s policy of support for the viciously anti-working class
nationalists of the Kuoming-tang in China, which led in 1927 to the betrayal and massacre of
the Shanghai workers’ uprising. Such overt acts of treason
demonstrated that the Stalinist faction, which had by then won almost complete
dominion over the CI and its parties, was no longer an opportunist current
within the workers’ movement but a direct expression of the capitalist
counter-revolution.

But it is nevertheless a fact that the roots of
this policy lay in errors and weaknesses within the workers’ movement,
and it is the duty of communists to explore these roots today in order to
better arm themselves against the process of degeneration, because:

“Stalinism
did not fall from the sky, nor did it arise from a void. And if it is absurd to
throw the baby out with the bathwater, so it is absurd to condemn the Communist
International because Stalinism developed and triumphed from within it... But
it is no less absurd to pretend that the dirty bathwater was always absolutely
pure and limpidity clear and to present the history of the Communist
International as divided into two neat periods, the first when it was pure,
revolutionary, spotless, without weakness, until sharply interrupted by the
explosion of the counter-revolution. These images of a happy paradise and a
horrible hell, with no link between them, have nothing to do with a real
movement, such as the history of the communist movement, where continuity flows
through profound splits and where future ruptures have their seeds in the
process of the continuity.”
(Introduction to texts of the Mexican Left 1938, in International Review
no. 20)

The Second Congress highlighted the dangers for the
workers’ movement of opportunism and centrism within its own ranks; and if
opportunism was only able to finally triumph in conditions of profound reflux
in the international class struggle, and the isolation of the Russian workers,
it could take root in the first place in all the existing vacillations and
hesitations of the revolutionary movement, exploiting all the ‘well-meaning’
efforts to smooth over differences with a finely turned word instead of
honestly confronting serious divergences.

These are the typical characteristics of centrism,
demonstrated clearly in the example of the Dutch communist Sneevliet
(‘Maring’), who in the Second Congress was apparently responsible for
‘resolving’ the problem of the divergence between the Theses of Lenin and Roy
by proposing, as secretary of the Commission on the National and Colonial
Question, that the Congress adopt both sets of Theses. Sneevliet in fact agreed
with Lenin that it was necessary to make temporary alliances with bourgeois
nationalist movements. In practice, it was this view which was to dominate the
policy of the CI and not Roy’s rejection of such alliances.

Sneevliet was appointed to the Executive Committee
of the CI and was sent to China as its Far East
representative. He became convinced that the Chinese nationalist Kuomingtang
had a ‘revolutionary potential’, and wrote in the official organ of the CI:

“If we
communists, who are actively trying to establish links with the workers of
north China are to work successfully, we must take care to maintain friendly
relations with the nationalists. The Thesis of the Second Congress can only be
applied in China by offering active support to the nationalist elements of the south (i.e.
the KMT – ICC). We have as our task to keep the revolutionary nationalist
elements with us and to drive the whole movement to the left.”(Kommunistische
Internationale 13 September 1922)

Five years later these same ‘revolutionary
elements’ beheaded communists and workers in the streets of Shanghai in an orgy of mass murder.

It’s important to stress that Sneevliet was only
one individual example of the danger of centrism and opportunism facing the
revolutionary movement. His views were shared by the majority of the CI.

They were shared to a greater or lesser extent even
by the left-wing communists, who failed to clearly present their positions.
Those like Bukharin and Radek who had opposed the slogan of self-determination
now appeared to accept the majority view, while the Italian Left around Bordiga
and the Communist Abstentionist Fraction, although against the opportunist
tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’, fully supported Lenin’s Theses. The
German Left, basing its position on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, was of all the
left fractions in the best position to make a determined, principled stand against
support for national liberation struggles in the CI, but the delegates of the
KAPD, who included Otto Ruhle, failed to participate, at least in part due to
councilist prejudices.

The theoretical gains made by the western European
lefts in the debates within the Zimmerwald Left during the war were not
concretised in the Second Congress. It was only with the defeat of the
revolutionary wave in the late 1920s that the few surviving left fractions, and
especially the Italian Left around the journal Bilan, were able to
conclude that the proletariat could give no support to nationalist movements
even in the colonies. For Bilan, the massacre in China in 1927 proved
that “The Theses of Lenin at the
Second Congress must be completed by radically changing their content... the
indigenous proletariat can... become the protagonist of an anti-imperialist
struggle only if it links itself to the international proletariat...” (Bilan no. 16, February 1935, quoted in Nation
or Class?, p. 32). It was the Italian Left, and later the Mexican and
French Lefts, who were finally able to make a higher synthesis of the work of
Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism and the experience of the revolutionary wave of
1917-23.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

The mistakes of the CI are clearly no excuse for
the same errors by revolutionaries today. The Stalinists long ago passed over
to the counter-revolution, taking the Communist International with them. For
the Trotskyists, the ‘possibility’ of support for nationalist struggles in the
colonies was transformed into unconditional support, and
in this way they ended up participating in the second imperialist world war.

Withinthe
proletarian camp, the Bordigists of the degenerated Italian Left devised a
theory of geographical areas where, for the vast majority of the world’s
population in the underdeveloped countries, the ‘anti-imperialist
bourgeois-democratic revolution’ was still on the agenda. The
Bordigists, by freezing the last dot and comma of the Theses of the Second
Congress, took over the centrism and opportunism of the CI, lock, stock and
barrel. The dangers of trying to apply its unworkable policies in the decadence
of capitalism were finally proved by the disintegration of the International
Communist Party (Communist Program) in 1981 after becoming thoroughly
corroded with opportunism towards various nationalist movements (see IR
32).

Which finally brings us to the ‘embarrassed’
Bordigists of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista,
now partially regrouped with the Communist Workers’ Organisation – see articles
on the IBRP in IRs 40 and 41). Battaglia defends a position against
national liberation struggles in decadence, as a group within the proletarian
political milieu. But shows a singular difficulty in breaking definitively with
the opportunism and centrism of the early CI on this and other vital questions.
For example, in its preparatory text for the Second Conference of Groups of the
Communist Left in 1978, BC fails to make any critique of the positions
of the Second Congress, or of the practice of the early CI, preferring instead
to support polemic against Rosa Luxemburg! BC’s vision of
a future party “turning movements of national liberation into proletarian
revolutions” introduces the danger of opportunism through the back door, and
has already led it, together with the CWO, into a filtration with the Iranian
nationalist group, the UCM (now the ‘Communist Party of Iran’ – a Maoist
grouping). Theses relations have been justified by the need to “help orientated new militants” coming from
a country “that has no communist history or tradition, a backward country...” (from a document presented by Battaglia at
an ICC public meeting in Naples
in July 1983).

This patronising attitude is not only an excuse for
the worst kind of opportunism, it is an insult to the communist movement in the
underdeveloped countries, a movement which despite the cringing excuses of Battagliahas a rich and proud history of principled
opposition to bourgeois nationalist straggles. It is an insult to the militants
of the Persian Communist Party who at the Second Congress warned that: “If one were to proceed according to the
Theses in countries which already have ten or more years of experience, or in
those where the movement has already had power, it would mean driving the
masses into the arms of the counter-revolution. The task is to create and
maintain a purely communist movement in opposition to the bourgeois-democratic
one.” (Sultan Zadeh, quoted in The
Second Congress, vol. 1, p.135).

It is an insult to the position of the Indian
Communist Roy (who was actually a delegate of the Mexican CP). It is an insult
to those in the young Chinese Communist Party like Chang Kuo-Tao who opposed
the official CI policy of centrism into the nationalist KMT.

Gorter once talked about the communist programme
being “hard as steel, clear as glass.” With the infinitely malleable, opaque
pronouncements of Battaglia Communista we are back on the same terrain
as the Second Congress of the CI over fifty years ago: the terrain of opportunism
and centrism, with an added dash of patronising chauvinism. It is a terrain
revolutionaries today must fight constantly to avoid. This is the most enduring
lesson of the past debates among communists on the national questions.